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Comment by paraschopra | Hacker News Reader

I'm (founder of Visual Website Optimizer) on HN. In case any one has any questions, comments, or suggestions please shoot!

(BTW: the number of users figure is closer to 5000 now!)

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@paras: I was surprised when I saw your ad running on Drudge Report. What does it cost to run an ad on a very high traffic site like that, and more importantly, did it covert well?

We are using re-targeting using Adroll (though other providers are also there). If you are on http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ they drop a cookie and then identify you as you travel on different sites on web. They bid across ad networks to show you the ad of VWO.

It costs approximately $1 per click and is perhaps the best investment you can make. But you have to be careful not to spook your users. Have a cap on how many times a person can see that ad in a day.

It converts OK but is great from branding point of view. People tend to remember VWO because they have been on site before.

I think a lot of us fall into the Adwords or nothing trap. I'd love to see a write-up of the different advertising options available on the web. I've looked around in the past, but too many of the write-ups are geared toward the affiliate marketing crowd.

Congrats on the growth!

Can you elaborate a bit on the numbers? Specifically revenues, margins etc

I knew this question was coming :)

I can't tell you exact revenues but I can talk a little about margins. Since we are handling about 900 million page views, our major cost is CDN (Amazon CloudFront) and Hosting (with Linode). Haven't been doing a lot of paid marketing so only expense we have is people and infrastructure. Actually tried various forms of paid marketing but none really worked so far.

Sorry if I put you on the spot, my main reason for asking was my curiosity regarding the cost of your CDN :) I figured that must make up the lion's share of your expenses.

Yes, CDN costs a lot more than I had initially expected (but it is still not a large % of total revenue)

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